Actress and activist Pauley Perrette will receive this year’s Tom Mankiewicz Leadership Award, an honor given to a philanthropic entertainer who has held a leadership role in local or global wildlife conservation, at the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association’s Beastly Ball.

“I’m so obsessed with animals,” said Perrette in an interview, “so much so that my producers started giving Abby scenes with animals.” The 44-year-old actress is best known as playing forensic scientist Abby Sciuto on CBS’ “NCIS.”

Perrette is involved with over 30 charities, but she points to the zoo and the animals as her favorite. She calls one of the resident L.A. Zoo elephants, Billy, “her boyfriend,” and launched an initiative to provide Kevlar vests to working military and police dogs on her birthday last year.

“Just because they are dogs doesn’t mean they don’t risk their lives to protect us,” Perrette told the Journal.

NCIS regularly counts audiences of 20 million viewers, and season 11 has already been greenlit by CBS. Perrette teased out the season 10 finale to the Journal.

“Abby is the heart of the team but she gets very very angry,” she said. “People haven’t seen angry Abby like this before. She doesn’t fight with the family but she’s angry.”

Colin Hanks will appear in the final two episodes of the season as Department of Defense Investigator Richard Parsons. “He’s coming in to cause trouble, that’s it,” said Perrette, quickly switching back to her coming award.

Previous winners of the Tom Mankiewicz Leadership Award include Slash of Guns’n’Roses and Sarah Michelle Gellar. The award is named after the late Tom Mankiewicz, a film and television writer and director who involved with such films as “Superman,” “Diamonds Are Forever” and “Live and Let Die.” It will be presented to Perrette on June 15 at the Los Angles Zoo.